Excerpt from Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty

"Barnaby Rudge" was published in the weekly numbers of "Master Humphrey's Clock." It followed immediately on the conclusion of "The Old Curiosity Shop." The publishers, Chapman & Hall, agreed to pay ?3000 for it, on the understanding that they were to have the profits of the sale for six months after the publication of the last number. The copyright was then to revert to Dickens. The work was published during the year 1841.

In writing this book, Dickens records, in his private letters, some of the strange freaks which his mind played with him when he most resolutely bent his energies to his task. On one day he writes to Forster: "I have been looking, (three o'clock,) with an appearance of extraordinary interest and study, at one leaf of the 'Curiosities of Literature' ever since half-past ten this morning - I haven't the heart to turn over." Again he despondingly confesses: "I didn't stir out yesterday, but sat and thought all day; not writing a line; not so much as the cross of a t or dot of an i... Last night I was unutterably and impossible-to-form-an-idea-of-ably miserable." Doubtless every man of creative genius has experienced at times these pauses of mental activity, when his mind appears dead within him, and he listlessly wonders if the lost inspiration will ever return.

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